AUK Finances and Website Project was: AUK Chairman Statement

[LittleWheelsandBig]

That is the problem with organisations with history. There are historical reasons for things.

As you already know, BRs have several advantages over BRMs for AUK, which means that BRs continue on, even when the original reason for their creation has disappeared.

[quixoticgeek]

That is the problem with organisations with history. There are historical reasons for things.

As you already know, BRs have several advantages over BRMs for AUK, which means that BRs continue on, even when the original reason for their creation has disappeared.

Yep... They also have several advantages, that many perhaps don't realise. Shame really.

But that's a different discussion, and off topic for this thread...

J

[bludger]

How about we all just pretend that the UK is the Netherlands and pay the Dutch audax club £50,000 (approximate value: 3,000 EUR) of AUK's money to let us use their website or whatever system it is they're using?

Then we can spend the difference on a giant big ride to the Netherlands and smoke enormous Camberwell carrots rolled up with brevet cards.

[grams]

I'll ask again, after AUK and its volunteers have done all they can to migrate over to the new site, how much will remain on the old site? and more importantly how long will the old site last?

Public information on this is very thin. You might be well placed to contact the people responsible directly and let us all know.

asking again; if I don't get a simple layman's reply I'll assume "as long as the server in someone's back bedroom still works"

Probably not far off.

(Until someone decides that switching it off will allow the project to be declared done is my guess)

[Martin]

I thought it was about being a national governing body delegated with the responsibility for validating riders for PBP.

If that was the main aim, more events would be BRM...

J

They all were until the numbers overwhelmed ACP's systems.  They told AUK to go away and do their own thing, and the BR was born.

Ian; it's not just about being a satellite of ACP LRM etc. Remember that within AUK BPs outnumber all the other distances put together in terms of validations; which all bring income into AUK not even including the £3 a pop non-member day insurance without which we'd have a lot less in the kitty. Where do BPs sit within ACP etc?

[S2L]

From an organisers POV auk provides backup of  national body plus liability insurance if anything goes wrong.

Yes, but there are other ways... I did look into alternatives to insure a ride, when the distance and route didn't quite marry the criteria for Audax.
Cycling UK provides a similar package

[Greenbank]

Perhaps some kind of new monastic order focused on IT work, where instead of brewing beer or keeping bees the monks and nuns would build and operate websites?

You mean a scary devil monastery perhaps?

I recovered, I haven't posted there for over 20 years.

[frankly frankie]

I'll ask again, after AUK and its volunteers have done all they can to migrate over to the new site, how much will remain on the old site? and more importantly how long will the old site last?
asking again; if I don't get a simple layman's reply I'll assume "as long as the server in someone's back bedroom still works"

The aukweb server is provided by a middling-sized UK-based hosting company and the account holder is an AUK official - so one answer to the question is it lasts as long as the hosting fees continue to be paid, and the provider continues to function as a going concern.  Of course either of these can change very rapidly (the hosting provider going down overnight without warning is always a fear), but in that case we have an exact copy of the server, with fully up-to-date data, hosted by another, much bigger rock-solid company, with a different account holder.  It's very robust if somebody dies or some company goes bust.

The plan presumably is to shut down the aukweb server when all the data (or as much as is wanted) has been migrated elsewhere.  As I said upthread, I can't see this happening in under 2 years, although that is just my figure plucked out of the air and based on my observation of current progress.  It's not moving the data that is the problem of course - that in itself is a trivial operation - it's creating the framework to deal with it in the new place.   The key difference between AUK's current operation and something superficially similar like, for example, CTC's Holidays&Tours arm (which Bludger mentioned, and which I happen to know a lot about) is that the latter runs with a lot of paid administrative input (part time, but several of them).  They operate at a different level from our self-administered model which has to be made more idiot-proof.  The Parkrun parallel is a more interesting one, I think.

[Greenbank]

parkrun is probably a much simpler model. Person X did run Y on date Z in time T is the bulk of it (you may think AUK's model is roughly the same but it really isn't). parkrun has its share of backend stuff for the volunteer roster but the majority of the DB schema would be pretty simple with relatively few exceptions.

The paid employees (i.e. CTC's paid administrative input) thing is an interesting point though, that seems to be how most other places manage this kind of thing and it makes a huge difference.

If there is money available then there's a choice: employing someone/people, outsourcing it or a mixture of both. (If there's no money available then you have to continue to make do with volunteers.)

I think the board possibly opted for the outsource option as it avoided the problem of employing someone to do something that FF (and others) have spent thousands and thousands of hours on for free. Notwithstanding the problems faced it should also have been the option that brought round the complete overhaul of the site in the shortest amount of time. However, (understatement time), it's gone far from smoothly.

The past can't be changed, and there's little point beating anyone up about the decisions that were made, what's important is that the right decisions are made about the future and "AUK has now engaged a lead developer directly." with no details has me more than a little concerned.

[bludger]

parkrun is probably a much simpler model. Person X did run Y on date Z in time T is the bulk of it (you may think AUK's model is roughly the same but it really isn't)

Maybe that's how it should be. The event organiser can decide whether someone has done the important job of hitting the control points in time based on data gathered by the controllers/info control responses i.e. 'have they completed the ride', and then hands off yes/no to the AUK website for the purposes of generating the certificates. What more metadata is required for AUK purposes aside from the date of the ride, for awards season calculations?

Surely it can't be too intensive a job to have a module that crunches a member's finished/not finished data to render awards. That's something excel can do. Indeed Microsoft offer a site building service which integrates with Office 365. https://sharegate.com/blog/office-365-sites-explained

I expect an excellent website could be built and operated using just 365 products, which all kinds of IT professionals could be contracted to build and maintain. There is always the possibility that Microsoft could go bust but then by that point we'd probably all have bigger problems to worry about.

The past can't be changed, and there's little point beating anyone up about the decisions that were made, what's important is that the right decisions are made about the future and "AUK has now engaged a lead developer directly." with no details has me more than a little concerned.

Indeed.

[Greenbank]

parkrun is probably a much simpler model. Person X did run Y on date Z in time T is the bulk of it (you may think AUK's model is roughly the same but it really isn't)

Maybe that's how it should be. The event organiser can decide whether someone has done the important job of hitting the control points in time based on data gathered by the controllers/info control responses i.e. 'have they completed the ride', and then hands off yes/no to the AUK website for the purposes of generating the certificates. What more metadata is required for AUK purposes aside from the date of the ride, for awards season calculations?

Surely it can't be too intensive a job to have a module that crunches a member's finished/not finished data to render awards. That's something excel can do.

That's not the point I was making (and AUK doesn't record times, that's a complete red herring).

parkrun is simpler because you either did one of their things or you didn't. Their awards are based on a simple count of how many of their things you've done. It couldn't be any simpler.

The point I was making is that AUK's awards aren't a simple count of how many things you've done.

Rider has achieved award X if they've done this set of rides, of this sub-type or this sub-type but not this sub-type, within these dates, except these rides that are tagged like this, oh and one of the rides that could qualify could actually be made up of 2 different rides (a calendar ride and an ECE) so you need to take that into account.

Oh, and some awards have sliding time windows (i.e. a B25000 or whatever it is that has to be done over a 6 year period) so you need to check each possible sub group of rides to see if any subgroup qualify for the award, etc.

Oh, and for this award (RTTY) this ride can definitely count for this month or possibly be counted for the following month but it needs a human to confirm that at least 200km of the ride was done in the later month, etc, etc.

It's all possible, and made much easier if the underlying DB schema is designed with the awards and things like ECE in mind, but it's made much harder (to impossible) with bad schema design. More importantly it takes someone with knowledge of all of the little quirks and foibles of AUK to come up with a decent schema (and suitable schema design experience), the thought of having to communicate all of this to an outsider in order for them to come up with a suitable schema is a terrifying thought.

parkrun, by contrast, is simple set of SQL queries.

The bulk of AUK's results processing work is custom programming to determine pretty much each and every one of the awards. I don't have a problem with this. For a lot of people AUK is about all of these weird and wonderful awards and it'd be a shame to lose that going forward.

But, again, the awards are still only part of it. The AUK site manages and streamlines a lot of the organiser process that riders simply don't see. It can do more to help out with membership work (which is what Phase II was mostly aimed at). It can do so much more for presenting ride information to potential riders.

[Martin]

I'll ask again, after AUK and its volunteers have done all they can to migrate over to the new site, how much will remain on the old site? and more importantly how long will the old site last?
asking again; if I don't get a simple layman's reply I'll assume "as long as the server in someone's back bedroom still works"

The aukweb server is provided by a middling-sized UK-based hosting company and the account holder is an AUK official - so one answer to the question is it lasts as long as the hosting fees continue to be paid, and the provider continues to function as a going concern.  Of course either of these can change very rapidly (the hosting provider going down overnight without warning is always a fear), but in that case we have an exact copy of the server, with fully up-to-date data, hosted by another, much bigger rock-solid company, with a different account holder.  It's very robust if somebody dies or some company goes bust.

The plan presumably is to shut down the aukweb server when all the data (or as much as is wanted) has been migrated elsewhere.  As I said upthread, I can't see this happening in under 2 years, although that is just my figure plucked out of the air and based on my observation of current progress.  It's not moving the data that is the problem of course - that in itself is a trivial operation - it's creating the framework to deal with it in the new place.   The key difference between AUK's current operation and something superficially similar like, for example, CTC's Holidays&Tours arm (which Bludger mentioned, and which I happen to know a lot about) is that the latter runs with a lot of paid administrative input (part time, but several of them).  They operate at a different level from our self-administered model which has to be made more idiot-proof.  The Parkrun parallel is a more interesting one, I think.

Thanks FF; from a historical POV I suppose all that matters is recording a list of riders distances (maybe whether perm or calendar so ECE would feature as two like now) AAA and dates (you could also argue making it AUK members only as non members are only searchable if you know the event and weren't even listed by name until recently), if it's a SQL database (or can be made into one) that could all go on Access with a query form at minimal cost. From there you can work out who was eligible for SR / RRTY etc, probably even the champions

[bludger]

The point I was making is that AUK's awards aren't a simple count of how many things you've done.

I'm sorry but I refuse to believe that the AUK awards are significantly complex enough such that a service like Microsoft Sites and the associated 365 products couldn't render it up given an appropriate 'power user' knowing what they're doing, and organisers having access to a platform that makes it easy for the system to import finished/not finished data.

If an award is unworkable/un-automatable to the point where it is costing the AUK treasury silly sums and energy to incorporate it is either time to fettle it such that it can be done or to scrap it altogether. I think the 'a lot of people' is a big overstatement; looking at the current websit see e.g. http://www.aukweb.net/results/archive/2019/b500/ (approx 34 Brevet 500 claimants), http://www.aukweb.net/results/archive/2019/b1000/ (624 Brevet 1000 claimants), or https://www.audax.uk/results/randonneur-brevet-multi-season/ (98 claimants Brevet 25,000).

Generously assuming about 1000-1500 people are presently interested in the awards, based on Brevet 1000 and Super Randonneur being the most-obtained last season, that's about 9-16% of AUK's c. 8000 (probably bigger) membership. Once the 'multi-season' awards are focused on, this goes down to more like 1%. This is coming to an absolute fortune and frankly I think people are looking in on AUK from the outside and wondering exactly what it is that is happening. I shared this thread with an Australian audaxer recently and he was just in total shock at what is going on.

More importantly it takes someone with knowledge of all of the little quirks and foibles of AUK to come up with a decent schema (and suitable schema design experience), the thought of having to communicate all of this to an outsider in order for them to come up with a suitable schema is a terrifying thought.

Quirks and foibles are fun but when they have the effect of putting the future of the organisation at risk then it is time to be ruthless and trim where necessary to make delivering the core business of the organisation the priority.

[Martin]

I don't think any of the distance related awards are actually claimed, they come up automatically, I certainly didn't claim a B1000 but I'm there. I know this because I've had ECE riders flag up that although an 300+ECE100 was picked up as an eligible 400 for an SR is didn't pick up for something else like a Randonneur 1000,

AAA RRTY and GdS have to be claimed because I think they require the validator to manually check the rider record (and in the case of GdS this may be over 2 AUK years)

[Greenbank]

The point I was making is that AUK's awards aren't a simple count of how many things you've done.

I'm sorry but I refuse to believe that the AUK awards are significantly complex enough such that a service like Microsoft Sites and the associated 365 products couldn't render it up given an appropriate 'power user' knowing what they're doing, and organisers having access to a platform that makes it easy for the system to import finished/not finished data.

I'm sure it would but who's going to do the work to create it? Who's going to maintain it? Who's going to update it when a new award is created?

The point is pretty much the same work has to be done regardless of what it is implemented in or where it is implemented. It doesn't suddenly cost 10x to do it on a website (unless the website developers are fleecing you). It's certainly cheaper if a volunteer does it, but then AUK has benefited from the huge input of FF and others over the years putting together the existing system for free.

Again, the awards are not a huge part of the AUK site in terms of development effort. Pulling figures from thin air I'd say they're probably less than 10% of the effort required in the full website rewrite. Having the awards on the new website is not the cause of it costing a huge sum of money.

Looking at the figures AUK have spent at least £200k on it over the course of two years. Once you take into account slices for profit, corporation tax, employee costs, etc you're realistically looking at the company having the equivalent of 1-1.5 people full time on the project over the course of those two years. Of course they'll have a bigger team, but that team will be working on a whole number of projects at any one time.

Quirks and foibles are fun but when they have the effect of putting the future of the organisation at risk then it is time to be ruthless and trim where necessary to make delivering the core business of the organisation the priority.

Indeed, although I don't think they are at risk and if they were it's not the fault of those specific quirks and foibles. It's the fault of the particular implementation that they seem to be continuing to press on with rather than stopping and reassessing.

[bludger]

I'm sure it would but who's going to do the work to create it? Who's going to maintain it? Who's going to update it when a new award is created?

I don't know enough about the industry to name a suitable person or organisation but looking at Microsoft it seems they actually offer a full solution, including appointing administrators and maintenance/updates etc. You give them a scope of works, they give a quote, you pay them and a website comes out the other end with all the maintenance and updates etc taken care of, off the back of a contract.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/services?activetab=pillars%3aprimaryr11

https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/search?sq=%22Azure%22&ff=&p=2&so=story_publish_date%20desc

It's what we did with my last workplace, the organisation had enough of running everything based off of 'bespoke' solutions and just migrated to Microsoft for everything.

[Greenbank]

OK, so my point stands. Instead of paying IIP (or whoever takes over it) you're just paying Microsoft to do all of your bespoke stuff.

...You give them a scope of works...

Is the tricky bit. That would take considerable effort to create a document that accurately describes what you'd need them (or anyone else) to do. FF has said before that he has had to spend a large amount of time guiding F1/IIP through how various parts of AUK worked so they could build parts of the new site.

[FifeingEejit]

Wot you mean like business analysis is hard?

Sent from my BKL-L09 using Tapatalk

[Jaded]

I'd imagine that the scope of works would be very detailed, otherwise you get a coder's interpretation of cloudiness.

[FifeingEejit]

I'd imagine that the scope of works would be very detailed, otherwise you get a coder's interpretation of cloudiness.

Depends on whether the BA is actually a BA or A dev trying to be a BA.
I've worked with both and the BA who had never written code was consederably better at writing specs, the failed devs have a tendency to try and tell me how to write stuff.


Sent from my BKL-L09 using Tapatalk

[Ian H]

I don't know if anyone has mentioned the events planner yet.  Each event has an organiser multi-page interface into which they add controls, risk assessments, and all the public details such as cost, facilities and descriptive blurb. The calendar is extracted from the planner. Then finish lists have to be checked, completed and sent for validation. 

None of this has been touched at all by the new project.

[frankly frankie]

Wot you mean like business analysis is hard?

There's a strong element of herding cats whenever cyclists are involved.

[frankly frankie]

Surely it can't be too intensive a job to have a module that crunches a member's finished/not finished data to render awards.

Fitbit does it brilliantly.
Every time you pass a personal milestone a snazzy virtual medal pops up on your phone, in real time.  I'd love AUK to emulate that.

[Kim]

Wot you mean like business analysis is hard?

There's a strong element of herding cats whenever cyclists are involved.

More generally, the easiest way to work out what a complicated computer program actually needs to do is by writing the complicated computer program and then trying to use it.  Can't do that yourself?  Then you need someone else to do it, which means you now have two problems.

[Greenbank]

I don't know if anyone has mentioned the events planner yet.  Each event has an organiser multi-page interface into which they add controls, risk assessments, and all the public details such as cost, facilities and descriptive blurb. The calendar is extracted from the planner. Then finish lists have to be checked, completed and sent for validation. 

None of this has been touched at all by the new project.

That's the kind of thing I've been alluding when I say there's a huge amount of backend stuff that the current site does that only organisers see.

All of this was done is various manual ways before and centralising it on the AUK website was seen as a huge productivity boost to the organisers and events secretary. I don't think any of those people want to go back to the old ways of doing it.